Everything looks investable
until someone checks.
We do the checking. Independent due diligence for funders, investors, corporates and business owners, the transaction support to get the deal done, and experienced operators to hold the gaps we find. For businesses that need to survive scrutiny rather than simply describe themselves well.
Commitment compounds.
Evidence does not.
Every transaction and every growth plan accumulates commitment: money, headcount, political capital, reputations attached to the outcome. That line only ever goes up.
The evidence line rarely moves after the business case is signed off. Nobody goes back to check, because checking is slow, unglamorous and occasionally produces an answer people did not want.
The distance between those two lines is the risk nobody has priced. Our entire job is to measure it while it is still cheap to close.
Nobody has ever been promoted for finding out they were wrong.
The reason organisations cannot mark their own homework is not dishonesty. It is incentives. The person who runs the numbers again and finds the problem becomes, in that moment, the obstacle. The person who keeps the deal moving is the one everybody thanks.
So the checking either gets done by someone with no career riding on the answer, or it does not get done at all. That is the entire service, and it is why the useful version of it has to come from outside the building.
It is also why we are direct about what we find. A soft finding is not a kindness. It is an invoice you pay later.
Verify it. Ready it. Staff it.
We bring independent judgement, commercial evidence and experienced operators to the decisions that sit between ambition and proof. Three lines, one standard. Most work starts at one of them and moves to the others, because the finding and the fix are rarely bought by the same person on the same day.
Independent commercial, technical and operational diligence for funders, investors, corporates and business owners, plus the transaction support to get the deal done. Written to be acted on rather than filed.
Explore Due Diligence →For founder-led businesses turning over US$2m to US$20m. We diligence you before a buyer does, move the judgement out of your head into a system the team can run, and take the business to a standard that prices well.
Explore Investable Ready →How a finding becomes a fix. Experienced operators placed into the gap the diligence or the readiness work exposed, with a defined mandate and an end date.
Explore Fractional Teams →Find out what your evidence is actually worth.
Twelve questions, about eight minutes. You get a score across five weighted dimensions, a level on the Investable Standard, and the specific gap holding it back. No call required to see the result.
Judgement built on real transactions.
Corporate strategy, mergers and acquisitions, corporate-wide innovation and IT transformation programmes, venture building and founder development.
Strategic transactions led or advised on across a twenty eight year career spanning technology transformation and mergers and acquisitions, rather than by the firm.
Across African markets, including cross-border and multi-jurisdiction transactions.
We are a good fit when...
If more than two of these are true, the conversation is usually worth having. If none of them are, we will tell you that rather than sell you something.
Capital, a deal or a mandate is about to be committed, and the case underneath it has not been independently tested.
The company works, and everybody quietly knows it would not work for long without the founder in the middle of it.
Somebody already did the analysis. Nothing changed, because no finding had an owner or a date attached to it.
You need someone to challenge the numbers who has no career riding on the answer, which nobody inside the building does.
What does your evidence
actually support?
Twelve questions about one opportunity. You get a score across five weighted dimensions, the specific gap holding it back, and the next move we would recommend. Nothing is stored unless you choose to send it to us.
Five weighted dimensions. Evidence carries the most weight, because it is the one that most often turns out to be missing.
If the evidence dimension scores below half marks, the result is capped regardless of everything else. A strong plan built on an untested problem is still an untested problem.
A score out of 100, a level on the Investable Standard, and the specific gap holding the opportunity back.
This is an indicative screening tool, not professional advice. It scores only the answers given. It does not consider your circumstances, and it is not a substitute for due diligence or for legal, financial, tax or investment advice. Many factors that would determine a real decision are not captured here, including matters neither party may be aware of at the time of completion. No reliance should be placed on this result and no decision should be taken on the basis of it alone. Investable and Opal Ice Investments (Pty) Ltd accept no liability for any decision taken or not taken in reliance on this output. Obtain professional advice before acting.
Next level
Where the score comes from
What we would do next
Send this result to Investable
If you want a view on it, send the score through. We will come back with a written read on the two things most likely to break this opportunity, before any conversation about working together.
This result is an indicative screening output, not professional advice. It reflects only the answers provided and has not been verified by us. It does not take your specific circumstances into account and is not a substitute for due diligence or for legal, financial, tax, accounting or investment advice. A real decision depends on many factors this tool does not assess, including matters that neither party may be aware of at the time of completion. No reliance should be placed on this result, and no decision to proceed, to stop, to invest, to acquire or to dispose should be taken on the basis of it alone. To the fullest extent permitted by law, Investable and Opal Ice Investments (Pty) Ltd accept no liability for any loss or damage arising from any action taken or not taken in reliance on this output. Obtain appropriate professional advice before acting.
Most diligence is written
to be filed.
Ours is written to be acted on. Independent commercial, technical and operational due diligence for funders, investors, corporates and business owners, followed by the transaction support to get the deal done. And where the diligence finds a gap, we can put someone in it.
Half of all diligence never becomes a plan.
Research on transactions is consistent and uncomfortable. Around half the time, the diligence carried out before a deal fails to give the buyer a usable roadmap for capturing the value they just paid for. The report informs a decision and is then filed.
The consequences show up later, in the first ninety days, when nobody can remember what the data room actually revealed and the people who read it have moved on to another mandate.
We write diligence as an execution document. What is true, what is at risk, what must happen first, and who does it. Then we stay for that part.
Four buyers, one standard of evidence.
Independent assessment of applicants and investees for state agencies, development finance institutions and grant funders. Technical readiness, commercialisation risk, management capability and the evidence behind the claim. Reporting built to survive an audit rather than to satisfy a committee.
Buy-side commercial and operational diligence on targets, and portfolio reviews on assets already held. We tell you what the founders have not, and we are direct about which risks are priced and which are not.
Diligence on acquisitions and internal ventures, with the group standard applied honestly. Often the useful finding is that the target runs on one person, which is a valuation question rather than a footnote.
Buy-side diligence for owners acquiring a competitor or a supplier, and vendor diligence for owners preparing to sell who would rather find the problems before the buyer does.
Four stages, and the last one is the point.
Before any data room opens, we agree which findings would actually alter the price, the structure or the answer. Diligence scoped to cover everything covers nothing well and costs more.
Produces · A scoped question listRaw data rather than management packs. Customers rather than references. The distinction between what we were told and what we saw is recorded explicitly throughout, because that distinction is the report.
Produces · Verified findings, sourcedEvery material finding carries a consequence and an action: renegotiate, structure around it, fix it in the first ninety days, or walk. A risk without an owner and a date is an observation, not a finding.
Produces · A first ninety days planWhere the diligence exposes a capability the business does not have, we can place a fractional operator to hold it while a permanent hire is found. This is the part almost nobody offers, and it is where the value actually lands.
Produces · A named person, with a mandateWhat we cover, and what we do not.
We are deliberate about the boundary. Being clear about what we do not do is what makes the rest credible.
Commercial and market diligence. Technical and technology readiness, including commercialisation risk. Operational diligence. Management and key person assessment. Customer and revenue verification. Integration and first ninety days planning.
Statutory audit, legal opinions or tax structuring. We work alongside your auditors and attorneys rather than pretending to replace them, and we will say so in the first meeting rather than the third.
For funders running many decisions at once.
A single diligence report answers one question. A funder makes hundreds of decisions a year and has to defend all of them later, often to someone who was not in the room. The Decision Ledger is how those decisions stay traceable.
What this programme or fund may decide, with whose money, and who can overrule it. Vagueness here is why decisions get relitigated two years later.
One written standard applied to every applicant, agreed before the applications arrive. A standard written afterwards is a justification, not a standard.
Every decision recorded with the evidence under it, who made it, and when it is revisited. This is what an auditor, a board or a public accounts committee will ask for.
Decisions tested against what actually happened, so the criteria improve rather than simply persist. Very few funders ever check whether their gate was predictive.
Four ways to use us.
A fast read on whether a target or an applicant is worth full diligence. Fixed fee, short turnaround, and a written answer that is allowed to be no.
Scoped to the questions that would change the decision, delivered as findings plus a first ninety days plan rather than as a document.
Alongside your corporate finance adviser and attorneys, from diligence through to completion, so that what was found in the data room actually reaches the agreement.
Ongoing diligence capacity for a fund, a programme or a funder with continuous deal flow, including panel appointments.
You were the evidence engine.
That does not scale.
Every good decision this business ever made ran through your judgement. You knew which customers mattered, which complaints were signal, which deals were real. That worked beautifully, and it is now the ceiling. We move that judgement out of your head and into a system your team can run, and we build the business a buyer would actually pay a premium for.
It is not that you are a bottleneck.
It is what you are a bottleneck for.
Plenty of advice will tell you to delegate more. That misses what is actually happening. The thing your team cannot do without you is not the work. It is the judgement: knowing which of two plausible options is right, which customer complaint is a pattern and which is noise, which deal is real and which is a polite maybe.
You built that judgement in the field over a decade, and none of it is written down. So the business can add people and revenue but it cannot add decision-making capacity, and past a point that is the same as not being able to grow.
Delegating tasks to people who cannot make the call just moves the queue. The work is to externalise the judgement itself.
Things founders say in the first meeting.
"Nothing gets decided while I am out of the country."
"We are growing and I am taking home less than I did two years ago."
"My best people keep asking me questions they should be answering."
"I know which numbers matter. Nobody else in the business does."
"Every client somehow becomes a custom job."
"If I stepped away tomorrow, this would be worth a fraction of what people think."
It is charged in three currencies.
Every week spent adjudicating is a week not spent on the handful of decisions that genuinely require you. The irony is that the more indispensable you become, the less of your actual value the business receives.
The company can only grow as fast as one person can make judgement calls. You can hire past a capacity problem. You cannot hire past a judgement problem, and most founders spend a year discovering the difference.
Buyers do not pay for revenue. They pay for cash flow that survives you leaving. Founder dependency is priced in quietly, in the multiple, and it is almost never itemised in the offer.
The uncomfortable version: the more valuable you personally are to this business, the less valuable the business is to anyone else. That is not a character flaw. It is arithmetic, and it is reversible.
Four levels. You are on one of them right now.
Most owners cannot say how ready their business is, because nobody has ever measured it against what a buyer or a funder would actually look for. The Standard is that measure. Each level has a gate, and you do not claim the next one until the gate is passed.
Diligence run on your own business, to the standard a buyer or a funder would apply, early enough that findings are still fixable rather than repriceable. Including the things nobody wanted written down.
Gate · An honest baselineEvery decision that currently routes through you gets a named owner, a written threshold and the evidence to decide on. Not delegation of tasks. Delegation of judgement, which is the part that has never been written down.
Gate · Right calls made while you are unreachableWhere the diligence found a capability gap, a fractional operator holds the seat until a permanent hire lands. This is the level almost nobody reaches alone, because it needs people in chairs rather than a plan in a document.
Gate · Ninety days, founder out of the critical pathCustomer concentration, contract quality, margin durability and reporting all hold under scrutiny from a buyer, a lender or an investment committee. Whether or not you sell, this is what the business is worth defending.
Gate · A data room you would open tomorrowSix things that outlast the engagement.
Written rules for the calls that currently need you. What can be approved, by whom, on what evidence, and at what point it comes to you anyway.
A weekly, monthly and quarterly cadence that surfaces problems while they are still cheap, rather than at the point where they arrive in your inbox as emergencies.
A small number of measures that actually predict the outcome, owned by named people. Most dashboards measure what is easy to count and nothing that changes a decision.
Named people with real authority and the evidence to use it. Built with the team you have wherever possible, and honest with you where it is not.
One acquisition channel that works without your personal network attached to it, measured properly, with economics you can defend to a buyer or a lender.
Numbers assembled the way a buyer, a bank or an investment committee will want to see them. Built now, quietly, so that a process later takes weeks rather than months.
When the constraint stops being you
and starts being the market.
Once the business can make decisions without you, the next ceiling is usually the size of the market you are in. That is the right moment to test an international one, and the wrong moment is any time before it, because a founder-dependent business cannot survive its founder spending a month abroad.
Most market access programmes end at the airport. A delegation flies out, sits through panels, photographs a stage, and comes home with business cards and no pipeline. The failure is not the trip. It is that the trip was the whole programme.
Decide which buyer, in which market, and why. Build the target list. Book meetings with people who hold budgets rather than intermediaries who hold introductions. Agree in writing what result would make you enter and what would make you walk away.
Gate · A list and a threshold, or no tripStructured conversations with buyers, channel partners and the people who would have to say yes internally. Notes taken to a standard, so what you heard survives the flight home. Evenings for synthesis rather than networking.
Gate · Real demand, or an honest noThe part almost nobody does. Follow-up owned by a named person, proposals out, pilots negotiated, and the practical questions answered: entity, tax, regulatory, pricing, who delivers.
Gate · Enter, wait, or choose elsewhereA small group of scaling companies travelling to the same market on fixed dates. Shared logistics and cost, with preparation and conversion run individually because the buyers are not the same. Suits sponsors funding several companies at once.
One company, one market, chosen to fit the proposition rather than the conference calendar. If your buyers are in a city nobody runs missions to, that is where we go.
Buyers are not buying what you think they are buying.
Every founder assumes the conversation will be about revenue and growth. It is about risk. A buyer is pricing the probability that the cash flow continues after you have gone, and every dependency they find is a reason to pay less or to structure more of the price as an earn-out you have to stay around to receive.
The things that quietly cost you: customer concentration, contracts that renew on relationship rather than on paper, margins that only work because you personally price the difficult jobs, and reporting that cannot be reconciled without you in the room.
None of that is fixed in the six months before a sale. It is fixed two to three years earlier, which is usually before the founder has admitted to anyone that they are thinking about it.
This is for you if...
You turn over between US$2m and US$20m, with a team that is capable but still routes the real decisions through you.
You are well past product-market fit and stuck in the part where growth adds complexity rather than margin.
You are willing to have your own decisions audited, which is the part most founders find hardest.
You are thinking about an exit in the next three to seven years, even if you have not said so out loud.
You are willing to invest in systems and technology, because judgement cannot leave your head without somewhere to put it.
Skip this if...
You are pre-revenue or still looking for product-market fit. Start with a structured programme that gets you into market and tests the idea properly, such as Founder Institute. Come back once you are generating revenue.
You want a coach or a sounding board rather than someone installing systems inside your business.
You want the benefits of a leadership layer without giving any of the decisions away.
You need the answer to be that everything is basically fine. Sometimes it is. Usually the founder already knows it is not.
Three routes in.
Owner-managed businesses funding the work themselves, usually because the alternative is another three years of the same week repeating.
Value creation inside a portfolio company. We work to the investment thesis and report against it, and we will tell you when the constraint is the management team rather than the market.
An internal venture or acquired business that has traction but has not been built to run at group standard. Often paired with our due diligence work.
Fractional Teams
Senior capability, in the seat, for exactly as long as it is needed. Diligence tells you what is missing and readiness work tells you what has to change, but neither happens on its own. This is how a finding becomes a fix: a named operator with a defined mandate and an end date.
The hire you cannot justify is usually the one you cannot do without.
Every growing business hits the same wall. There is work that plainly needs someone senior, and not enough of it to justify a permanent salary, benefits and the risk of getting the hire wrong. So it gets absorbed by whoever has capacity, which is usually the founder, or it does not get done.
Hiring too early burns cash you needed for something else. Hiring too late costs a year. Fractional is the honest answer to the period in between, and the period in between is longer than most owners expect.
There is a bigger idea underneath it. The companies that compound fastest are the ones whose capability can move as quickly as their opportunities do. That is difficult when every increase in capability means a permanent appointment, a payroll commitment and a twelve month recovery if the person is wrong.
Capability that moves at the speed of the opportunity.
A permanent hire is a fixed cost attached to a variable need. It arrives slowly, it is expensive to reverse, and it commits the business to a shape it may not hold in eighteen months. That is a reasonable trade for a settled business. It is a poor one for a business trying to grow quickly.
Fractional inverts it. You take capability up when a market opens, a transaction lands or a function breaks, and you take it down again when the need passes, without carrying the overhead, the notice periods or the difficult conversation. Two days a week for six months, then nothing. Or one day a week indefinitely, which is often all a function needs.
The point is not saving money on a salary. It is that the business stops being limited by what it can afford to commit to permanently.
Useful at every stage, for different reasons.
This is not only an early-stage instrument. The reason changes as the business grows, but the shape of the need does not.
A business with revenue but no leadership layer. One experienced operator two days a week is worth more than three junior hires, and costs less. The goal is to buy judgement, not hours.
The stage the Investable Standard calls Running. Someone holds the seat while the systems get built and the permanent hire is found, so growth is not gated on one recruitment process going well.
An acquisition closes and the finance function turns out to be one person and a spreadsheet. The first ninety days are the wrong time to run a search. We put someone in on day one and start the search from a stable base.
A resignation at the wrong moment, a sudden gap, or a departure the business had been quietly dreading. An experienced operator steadies it, documents what only that person knew, and hands over properly.
For funds and groups: shared senior capability across several portfolio companies, none of which could carry the cost alone. One capable finance or commercial lead across four businesses is a common and unusually efficient arrangement.
A named senior person on an investment committee or a venture board, with a defined mandate and an end date. Someone with no career riding on the answer, which is the only way an organisation reliably gets an honest one.
What we place.
Numbers a board or a lender can rely on, cash discipline, funding readiness, and the reporting that a transaction will eventually demand.
First revenue in a new segment, channel design, pricing, and the sales motion that has to work before a permanent hire makes sense.
Delivery, systems and the unglamorous process work that decides whether growth improves margin or quietly destroys it.
Turning a validated proposition into something shippable, with a roadmap tied to commercial evidence rather than to enthusiasm.
Running the venture, the integration or the programme day to day while a permanent leader is found and brought up to speed.
Independent presence on a board or committee, with the mandate written down and a date on which it ends.
Named people. Written mandate.
An end date.
Every engagement starts with what the operator owns, what success looks like, and when it stops. If we are still there after the mandate ends without a good reason, something has gone wrong.
No pooled resource, no account manager standing between you and the person doing the work. You meet the operator before you commit.
The mandate includes documenting what they built and training whoever inherits it. An operator who leaves a dependency behind has not finished.
The point at which a permanent hire becomes better value than us is a point we will name out loud, and it is usually earlier than a staffing firm would tell you.
Who is asking
the questions?
A fair thing to want to know before you let someone examine your business, or the one you are about to buy. Investable is a small South African advisory firm built to do one thing properly: establish what is actually true about a business, and then help fix what is not.
Because the checking rarely gets done.
Across a long career in corporate strategy and transactions, the same pattern kept appearing. Decisions worth hundreds of millions resting on a case nobody had independently tested. Not through carelessness, but because the person best placed to test it was the person whose project it was.
Organisations cannot mark their own homework. Not because people are dishonest, but because the person who finds the problem becomes, in that moment, the obstacle. So the checking either gets done by someone with no career riding on the answer, or it does not get done at all.
That is the firm. Independent judgement, commercial evidence, and operators who can act on what we find.
Keshni Morar
Founder and Chief Executive. Twenty eight years across corporate strategy, mergers and acquisitions, corporate-wide innovation and IT transformation programmes, venture building and founder development.
The transaction experience covers more than twenty complex deals across African markets, including cross-border and multi-jurisdiction transactions, with a cumulative value of around $4.5 billion. The transformation work matters as much: it is why technical diligence is not outsourced here, and why a conversation about a company's systems does not have to be translated for us.
Alongside the commercial firm, she leads the Investable Foundation, and is the local partner for Founder Institute in South Africa.
Buy-side and sell-side diligence, deal execution and integration, across corporates, funders and owner-managed businesses.
Corporate-wide innovation and IT transformation programmes, which is where the technical and operational diligence capability comes from.
Building businesses from validated opportunities, and knowing from experience which parts of the plan usually break first.
More than three hundred founders supported since 2021, of whom over seventy five reached a market.
Deliberately small.
Deliberately senior.
We do not carry a bench. Every mandate is staffed from a network of senior operators we have worked alongside for years, assembled for the specific problem and released when it is solved.
That is not a compromise. It means you get people who have actually run the function rather than whoever was available, and it means our overheads are not quietly priced into your fee. It is also why we can say no to work: we are not feeding a payroll.
We work with a small number of engagements at a time, which is a capacity decision rather than a posture, and it is why we assess fit before proposing a conversation.
The formal part.
100% Black Woman-Owned. Spend with us is recognised at 135% of value on your preferential procurement scorecard.
Local partner in South Africa, and the route through which our founder development methodology was built and tested.
Strategic partnerships that give South African businesses routes into markets and mentor networks beyond it.
We take no commission from funders, lenders or acquirers, and we hold no position in anything we assess. Our fee is the only thing we earn from an engagement.
We work under mutual non-disclosure as standard, and client names are shared only with written permission. Which is why you will not find a logo wall here.
A separate non-profit entity running founder development, skills and agriculture programmes. See the Foundation →
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Opal Ice Investments (Pty) Ltd, trading as Investable. Gauteng, South Africa. Last updated 10 August 2026.
Draft for attorney review before publication.
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The following are available on this website or on request without a formal PAIA application: our service descriptions, published frameworks, terms of use, privacy notice, this manual, and Foundation programme information and reporting formats.
5. Records held
Company records including founding documents, statutory registers, minutes and resolutions. Financial records including accounting records, tax records, banking records and statutory returns. Client and engagement records including proposals, engagement letters, non-disclosure agreements, working papers, deliverables and correspondence. Personnel and contractor records including agreements and payment records. Marketing and website records including enquiry submissions and assessment submissions. Foundation records including programme design, participant records, funder agreements and monitoring and evaluation reporting.
6. Records held under other legislation
Records are held in terms of, among others, the Companies Act 71 of 2008, the Income Tax Act 58 of 1962, the Tax Administration Act 28 of 2011, the Value-Added Tax Act 89 of 1991 where applicable, the Basic Conditions of Employment Act 75 of 1997, the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act 53 of 2003, POPIA and the Nonprofit Organisations Act 71 of 1997 in respect of the Foundation.
7. How to request access
A request must be made on the prescribed form and submitted to the Information Officer at the address above. The request must provide sufficient detail to identify the record and the requester, state the right the requester seeks to exercise and why the record is required to exercise it, and specify the form of access required. The prescribed fees payable are those published under PAIA. A decision will be given within thirty days, subject to any permitted extension. Where access is refused, reasons will be given together with the remedies available.
8. Grounds for refusal
Access may be refused on the grounds set out in Chapter 4 of Part 3 of PAIA, including the protection of the privacy of a third party, the commercial information of a third party or of the company, confidential information held by a third party, information privileged from production in legal proceedings, and research information.
9. Processing of personal information under POPIA
Categories of data subjects and their personal information: prospective and current clients, being contact and organisational details, enquiry content and engagement records; contractors and service providers, being contact, contracting and payment details; Foundation participants, funders and mentors, being contact details, application and programme records; website visitors, being form submissions and, where consented to, analytics data. Personal information is processed for the purposes of responding to enquiries, delivering engagements and programmes, meeting legal and regulatory obligations, and reporting to funders. Recipients include service providers who host or process on our behalf and regulators where required by law. Security safeguards include access control, confidentiality obligations and reputable hosting and processing providers. Cross-border transfer occurs where a service provider processes outside South Africa, subject to comparable protection.
10. Availability and updates
This manual is available on this website and at our address on request. It is reviewed annually and updated as required.
These documents, including the PAIA manual, are a working draft prepared for internal use. They have not been reviewed by an attorney and should not be published in this form. A South African commercial attorney should review them, particularly the limitation of liability, indemnity, PAIA manual and FAIS position, before this site goes live.
She has been building it
for two years.
Nobody has told her.
Her savings went in first. Then her mother's. She left a job for this. Every person she has asked has said it is a good idea, because everyone she has asked is someone who loves her.
Not one of them has ever sold anything to the kind of customer she needs. So nobody has asked the question that would have ended it in month two, and she is now twenty-two months past the point where the answer would have been cheap.
Registered public benefit organisation. Section 18A tax certificates issued for qualifying donations.
One person in the room who has done it before.
There is a founder in Sandton with roughly her idea. In his second week somebody took him for coffee, listened for ten minutes, and said the thing nobody else would say. He changed direction that month. It cost him a fortnight and a bruised ego.
He was not smarter. He was not working harder. He happened to know someone who had built three companies and was willing to be blunt over a flat white.
That is the whole difference. Not talent, not ambition, not education, not appetite for risk. Proximity. Who you happen to sit near when you are wrong about something.
Advice is the cheapest thing in the world and almost impossible to get if you do not know anyone who has it. That is what your money buys. Not a workshop. A person in the room, early, willing to say the difficult thing.
We are not funding a programme. We are funding the sentence that gives someone back two years of their life.
Seventy five businesses exist that would not otherwise.
Not seventy five people who attended something. Seventy five businesses that reached a market, took money from a customer, and employed somebody. We have been doing this since 2021, cohort after cohort, and we count the only number that matters.
Businesses that reached a market, took money from a customer and employed somebody. Since 2021.
People taken through a structured programme since 2021. Seventy five of them reached a market. The rest found out early, which was the point.
Operators who have built and sold companies, on our books and matched to founders by sector and stage.
Reachable through our strategic partnerships, so a founder in Tembisa can be advised by someone who has done it in Berlin or Bangalore.
These are not case studies.
They are companies.
Founders who came through our programmes and now run real businesses across South Africa, Kenya and Uganda. Every one of them was told, at some point, something they did not want to hear. All of them kept going anyway, which is the part we cannot teach.
A selection from more than 300 founders supported since 2021. Company logos to follow.
Not a course. A structured route to market.
Every funded founder gets the same thing a well-connected founder gets by accident: people who have done it before, a method that forces them into the market, and something in their hands at the end of it.
Matched by sector and stage from over 150 operators in South Africa, and more than 30 000 reachable through our global partnerships. Not a volunteer with good intentions. Someone who has built the thing and can say why it will not work.
A structured route from idea to first customer, with gates that force the founder out of the building and into real conversations. Nobody graduates on a business plan.
We encourage founders to fail fast and move on. Finding out in week eight that the business will never be viable saves years, savings and a family's patience. That is a good outcome and we say so out loud.
The moment most founders stall is the moment they need to build something real and cannot afford anyone to build it. Graduating founders get access to our fractional resource pool: developers, product managers, testers, business development, legal, accounting, compliance and advisory support, allocated as availability and programme budget allow.
We let founders fail.
Early, and on purpose.
Most programmes measure attendance, because attendance is easy to count and nobody is embarrassed by it. Ours measures evidence. Every founder has to go out, speak to real customers, come back with what they actually heard, and pass a gate before continuing.
Some do not pass. We tell them so, to their face, with the reasons written down. It is the hardest hour of the programme and it is the most valuable thing we do.
A founder who finds out in week two that nobody will pay has been handed back two years, their savings and their mother's savings. A programme that hands everyone a certificate has handed them a certificate.
We make them go and find out.
Founders do not fail because they cannot build. They fail because nobody made them check. Every founder we fund runs this loop, and every stage ends somewhere they can be stopped.
Out of the building and into real conversations with the people who hold the problem and the budget. Recorded, attributed, and checked for the signs of research done from a laptop.
Gate · Real demand, or stopTurn what they heard into a named buyer, a named alternative and a reason someone would switch. Written so that a stranger can argue with it.
Gate · A buyer they can namePut a real offer in front of that buyer and ask. A pilot, a price, a signature. Encouragement is free, so we look for the things that cost the buyer something.
Gate · Something signedA case built from what actually happened, with the parts still unproven named out loud instead of buried at the back.
Gate · Continue, change, or stopThree programmes, one principle.
Get someone experienced into the room early, make them prove it in the market, and put something practical in their hands at the end. The principle holds whether the person is building software, looking for work, or farming.
Aspiring founders in the technology space taken from an idea to a market in a structured way, with mentorship, hard gates, and access to fractional developers, product managers and testers on graduation to firm up the product. We would rather a founder stopped in week eight than spent three years proving what a fortnight of conversations would have told them.
Not everyone should start a business, and pretending otherwise does real harm. We train people in skills that international employers are actively hiring for, starting with sales, and help them into roles with firms abroad. Graduates receive lifetime access to our international sales job boards, so the support does not end when the programme does.
Capacity building for farmers, together with the two things that actually determine whether a farm survives: access to funders, and off-take agreements that guarantee somebody buys the crop. Both are brokered through our global partner network. We manage delivery end to end and remain accountable to the funder for monitoring and evaluation.
You fund it. We run all of it.
Most funders discover too late that a grant is really a project management commitment. Somebody has to design the thing, find the founders, run the sessions, chase the data and write the report, and that somebody usually ends up being the person who wrote the cheque. We take all five.
Built to your sector, region and outcome definitions, with the measures agreed before it starts rather than reverse engineered afterwards.
Sourcing and selection through university, corporate and community channels, with a published standard so the intake can be defended.
Facilitators who have built and sold companies, running the same methodology used with fee-paying corporate clients.
Evidence collected during the programme rather than surveyed afterwards, so the numbers describe what happened rather than what people remember.
Written for your board, trustees or investment committee, in the format your reporting framework already requires.
Programmes are built to a brief, not bought off a shelf.
We work with philanthropists, family foundations, corporate social investment teams and development finance institutions. Tell us the sector, the geography and what you need to be able to say at the end of it. We come back with a scoped programme, a cost, and the outcomes we are prepared to be measured on.
A cohort built around a single vertical: agriculture, health, energy, manufacturing, financial services, mining services. Founders selected for relevance to that sector, and market testing run against buyers inside it.
A cohort delivered in a specific province, township or second city, with a local delivery partner trained to run it again after we leave. Designed so the capability stays behind.
Founders developed inside your own value chain, so the outcome is not only a social one. You end up with suppliers who can meet your standards, and a pipeline you helped build rather than one you went looking for.
A named programme across two to three years and multiple cohorts, with governance participation, agreed outcome measures and reporting designed around what your board actually needs to see.
You will know what happened to your money.
Quarterly reporting against agreed outcomes, naming the ventures, the stage each one reached, and the ones that stopped. We report the failures because they are the part that proves the gate is real.
Investable Foundation NPC is a registered public benefit organisation with Section 18A approval. A Section 18A receipt is issued for every qualifying donation, which the donor claims as a deduction from taxable income. Not every donation qualifies: the deduction applies to bona fide donations used for approved public benefit activities listed in Part II of the Ninth Schedule to the Income Tax Act, and the amount deductible is capped. SARS publishes the requirements and a searchable list of approved organisations. What qualifies for a Section 18A deduction ↗
Contributions may qualify for recognition under Socio-Economic Development on your B-BBEE scorecard, and supply chain programmes may qualify under Enterprise and Supplier Development. We provide the documentation your verification agency asks for.
The Foundation is governed by an independent board. Funding decisions and programme oversight sit with that board. Annual financial statements are audited and available to funders on request.
Somebody is two years in right now.
Any amount funds a place on a programme. Email us and we will send you the banking details. You receive a Section 18A receipt for qualifying donations, and you will be told what your contribution went towards rather than thanked and forgotten.
Email us and we will send you the account details and issue a Section 18A receipt. Deduction limits and qualifying conditions apply.
Fund a founder who does not know you exist yet.
Tell us roughly what you have in mind and we will come back with a specific proposal: which region, how many founders, what you would receive and when. No standard pack, because a standard pack tells you nothing about your own money.
What decision
are you trying to make?
Tell us what is commercially important and not yet proven. We read every enquiry ourselves and come back with a view, not a calendar link.
Selective by design. We work with a small number of high-consequence engagements where senior attention, evidence and execution matter. That is a capacity decision rather than a posture, and it is why we assess fit before proposing a conversation.